Obama May Help Democrats’ Future in Shift to FDR

Jan. 25 (Bloomberg) -- Like Clinton or like Roosevelt?
That’s the question people are raising about the kind of second
term that U.S. President Barack Obama will seek.

The policy the president sets in coming weeks, and
especially the rhetoric of his public addresses in this early
period, can give us the answer. Signs so far are that Franklin
Delano Roosevelt will be Obama’s model, which portends negative
news in the economy but perhaps good news for the Democratic
Party.

President Bill Clinton started his second term signaling
ideological and political compromise. In his inaugural address,
Clinton spoke often of “we,” and twinned Democratic goals with
the one that Republicans hold dearest: smaller government.
Clinton talked of “a government that is smaller, lives within
its means, and does more with less.”

He brought up an idea that had long been as precious to
Democrats as small government is to Republicans: welfare. But in
speaking of welfare he emphasized shrinking it. “Government is
not the problem, and government is not the solution,” Clinton
said. A scholar of presidential rhetoric, Elvin Lim of Wesleyan
University, notes that Clinton’s compromises showed up in his
syntax: When the Republicans found a phrase, the Democrats did,
too.

More balancing was evident in Clinton’s State of the Union
address in 1997, when he used the word “bipartisan” six times,
which was six times more than it appeared in his first State of
the Union, in 1993. In 1997, he uttered the word “budget,” an
old Republican fave, 17 times, compared with only seven times in
his 1993 State of the Union.

Clinton’s Caution

Clinton signaled that he was scaling back on his first
term’s ambitious health-care plan when he told the 104th
Congress that his budget, not a comprehensive program, was the
policy answer for health care, saying of uninsured children that
his current budget would “extend health care to up to 5 million
of those children.”

Roosevelt didn’t balance after his re-election in 1936. He
attacked. Roosevelt’s second inaugural address, like Clinton’s,
included a powerful “we,” but it wasn’t a uniting “we” or
“us.” His listeners were either with us or against us.
Roosevelt took a dig at opponents’ projects: “Evil things
formerly accepted will not be so easily condoned.” Roosevelt
assailed budget hawks by suggesting their thrift betrayed poor
character: “Hard-headedness will not so easily excuse hard-heartedness.” He repeatedly warned of the cost of disagreeing:
“We are beginning to abandon our tolerance.”

Where Clinton rejected government as the solution,
Roosevelt embraced it: “Repeated attempts at their solution
without the aid of government had left us baffled and
bewildered.” Finally, FDR warned of even greater projects to
come: “We are fashioning an instrument of unimagined power for
the establishment of a better world.”

Roosevelt’s annual message to Congress, which happened to
fall before his 1937 inaugural, spoke of cooperation, yet then
defined cooperation as action by Congress. Because Democrats
ruled in both houses at that time, cooperation meant government
the Democrats’ way.

Early as we are in the new administration, we can see that
Obama looks more like Roosevelt than like Clinton. In the debate
over the debt ceiling, the president is challenging Republicans
to a fight, not joining them. While we haven’t heard his State
of the Union address yet, in his inaugural, Obama’s “we”
resembled Roosevelt’s, suggesting you were either with him or
against him.

Like Roosevelt’s, too, Obama’s rhetoric featured a bit of
mockery. He aped, or at least challenged, conservatives by
throwing their constitutional phraseology back at them: “We,
the people, understand that our country cannot succeed when a
shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it,”
he said.

Roosevelt’s Pugnacity

Like Roosevelt, Obama went after his opponents, when he
said entitlements “do not make us a nation of takers.” That
was a clear reference to House Budget Committee leader Paul
Ryan’s statement that America is divided between takers and
makers.

“Here Obama is coming out as a liberal, he is not being
politically correct,” Lim of Wesleyan says. The 44th president,
like the 32nd, put forward big ambitious goals: “collective
action” on gay rights and climate change.

Finally, Obama vehemently defended spending, suggesting
that cuts represent a betrayal of a great social contract.
Ominously, Obama put Medicaid and Medicare in a class with
Social Security, meaning they were all holy, speaking of “the
commitments we make to each other, through Medicare, Medicaid
and Social Security.”

Economically, a second-term president who resembles FDR
more than WJC portends bad news. Clinton’s decision to take the
moderate course was followed by growth. Indeed, the 42nd
president came out No. 1 in an Economist magazine ranking of 10
second-term presidents’ economic performance. Roosevelt, by
contrast, came out sixth. Some of us think he ranks even lower.
The famous “depression within a depression” took place in his
second term.

Politically, however, Obama’s bold posture may benefit both
him and his party, Lim says. Lim suggests that Clinton retreated
to caution because he lived in the era of Ronald Reagan.
Roosevelt created his own era, which continued under Harry
Truman. Obama, too, Lim suggests, is declaring a new era: “The
age of Obama has descended on us.”

(Amity Shlaes, a Bloomberg View columnist, is the director
of the Four Percent Growth Project at the Bush Institute and the
author of the forthcoming “Coolidge.” The opinions expressed
are her own.)

Amity Shlaes is a senior fellow and director of the Four Percent Project at the George W. Bush Institute. She is the author of the best-sellers "The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression" and "The Greedy Hand: Why Taxes Drive Americans Craz
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